New York Times Appears Hacked by Syrian Group

Security researchers say the New York Times appears to have been attacked by a group known as the Syrian Electronic Army.

The hackers were able to successfully redirect Times users to sites that the group controls, said HD Moore, a researcher at Internet security firm Rapid7. The hacker group infiltrated a computer system, located in Melbourne, Australia that routes users to website servers, Mr. Moore said. He used domain registry service Whois.com to track the ownership of the domain, or Web address, to an organization using an email address commonly associated with the Syrian Electronic Army, Mr. Moore told CIO Journal.

The domain address for the New York Times has been switched to a Web address controlled by the group.

In the changed domain registry, the owners of the new address gave an email address commonly associated with the hacker group. “They are at least trying to make it appear that they are the Syrian Electronic Army,” Mr. Moore said.

The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment at publication time. On an alternate site, the Times said the attack was “the result of a malicious external attack by the Syrian Electronic Army “or someone trying very hard to be them.”

The domain registration for Twitter was also changed at publication time.

Update at 7:04 pm: Twitter said in a post “our DNS provider experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter’s domains used for image serving, twimg.com. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted. By 22:29 UTC, the original domain record for twimg.com was restored. No Twitter user information was affected by this incident.”

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